New Year’s Resolutions February 20, 2012

Another was to enter more contests. I mean, someone has to win them, right?

Another was to make dinner (not thaw and hear dinner) 3 times a week. That has been an epic fail so far.

The last was to try at least one new recipe a week.

So tonight, while I was working on the blog post about bib cards I decided to make Snickerdoodle Bread.I found the recipe on Lil’ Luna’s website via Pinterest:

Ingredients

2 1/2 c. – all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 cup butter, softened

2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

3/4 c. sour cream

1 pkg. Hershey’s cinnamon chips

The only problem was that Hershey’s cinnamon chips don’t appear to be readily available anywhere. So when my boyfriend called from the baking aisle to tell me there was no such thing, I told him to bring me a bag of Heath English Toffee Bits. I figured toffee was a complimentary flavor to cinnamon and sugar.

Besides the chips, the only other adaptation I made was to add a little more cinnamon, because I believe there can never be too much cinnamon.

Mix flour and baking powder in a separate bowl. Add to wet ingredients and mix until all combined.

Add cinnamon chips and stir into batter. Set aside.

Spoon batter into 4 mini loaf pans until about 2/3 full.*

Mix 3 T. sugar and 3 t. cinnamon in a bowl and sprinkle over the batter in each loaf pan.

Bake at 350 for 35-38 minutes. Let cool before removing from pan.

Love pink mixer

* I enjoy muffins, myself, so I made one large loaf and a half-dozen bakery-sized muffins. Of course I ran out of papers so two don’t have them and they look a little lame, but they taste the same, so I’ll get over it. I used Baklene spray on the loaf pan and on the paperless wells. It doesn’t corrode pans and it’s less greasy than Pam.

I (and Martha, recently saw on her show) recommend using a large-sized cookie/ice cream scoop to fill the muffin tins. Two scoops per well works out about perfectly for the larger muffin tins, and it is the least messy way I have found to fill muffin cups. I know you can find them at Williams-Sonoma. They make smaller sizes too, which are good for recipes that call for 1-in size scoops of dough. LL uses them to fill stuffed shells, which is pretty ingenious too.

Here’s another Martha/LL tip for you. When you have several small pans in the over at once, put them on a cookie sheet. It makes them easier to turn half-way through the bake time, and for transferring them to/from the oven easily.

I was delighted that for once I followed the instruction exactly from a website and it actually came out as promised. I feel like I usually have to make a lot of adaptations. After trying the finished product, I can say the toffee bits worked just fine in this recipe, although I can’t say that they really add anything. I am thinking that I might just omit them altogether next time if I still can’t find cinnamon chips. That would cut down on the amount of sugar in the recipe.

The recipe came out great and was not particularly time-consuming. I wrote a blog post in the time it took to bake, and in the time it took me to write THIS post, FAB has eaten half the pan, so I gotta go before all that’s left is crumbs!